Naval: Uncomfortable Truth about Life | Lessons on Growth, Building Relationships, Spirituality

This was one of the biggest days of my podcasting career. That's the magic of Naval Ravikant. Nal rant, Naval Ravikant, founder of Angel. Del no rikan, Naro rakan, the founder of Angelist, which is a giant business. I mean, global.

I wonder if you've ever thought of that reality: if your parents didn't leave India and go to the US, how would your life be different, according to you? The first time I used an Apple computer, it was an old Macintosh. I just fell in love with it. At some point, if you have high agency, you will end up where you're meant to go. It's just going to take some effort.

Did it do anything for your mind? I kind of sometimes have these near-death exercises where it's just like I imagine myself dying. It's like you can see things fading out. They call orgasm the petite mort, "the little death," right? Did you ever smoke weed? You know, I live in California. Well, the common belief now is that like mushrooms are harmless, right? They're not.

Do you miss your childhood? I don't have a... It's like a dream. Is it real? Actually happened. B has had a great saying: "In every human, there is a sense that something infinite has been lost." Wow. Has marriage brought further understanding when it comes to life? There's a secret to a happy relationship: is to happy people. You know what I've learned about marriage? One's wife is always right, and that's the rule one should follow. Yes, I reject that completely. Uh, yeah, people say like, "Happy wife, happy life." That's all propaganda. That's all feminine propaganda. You're being brainwashed. No, both people have to be equally happy. Really?

You know, from the outside looking in, I personally have this impression of Naval Ravikant, the brand, and the human, and I feel like nothing hurts that guy. I'm a very paranoid person, so my rule is I don't fight with people. If somebody wants to fight with me, we get one fight, and then it's over. There's a lot of people out there, and life is long.

Do you pray? If you are older in life and you don't have the next generation to look forward to, then you better find God fast, because I don't think like your own mind and your own life will be kind to you as you get older.

If you know who Naval Ravikant is, please head straight into the conversation. This intro is primarily crafted for those of you who are being introduced to Naval Ravikant for the first time. Surprisingly, there's a lot of people in India who are yet to be introduced to who I consider to be the greatest philosopher of our times. I genuinely believe that history will remember him as one of the greatest minds that lived in the 21st century. He's an extremely humble, extremely relaxed individual, so I know that this intro is going to bother him on some level. That's the side of Naval that I got to know through this conversation. This is the most casual conversation that the internet has ever seen with this man. It was one of the biggest honors of my own podcasting career to be sharing screen space and podcasting space with Naval Ravikant. If I had to introduce him professionally, of course, I'd tell you how he's one of the most iconic angel investors in the world. Of course, I'd tell you about how he's one of the most important thought leaders for Silicon Valley and the world of global Twitter, or X. It's Naval Ravikant on the RV Show. This is one of the most memorable episodes for me on a personal level, but if you're looking for depth in conversation, it doesn't get deeper than Naval Ravikant's mind. It's Naval on TRS. Huge day for my career, honestly. Huge day for my own human experience. Enjoy the [Music] episode.

This is one of the biggest days of my podcasting career, but I'm also feeling supremely comfortable. That's the magic of Naval Ravikant. Oh, you're very nice. Welcome to the Ren Show, sir. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Uh, visualize this moment so much over the years. So, as I told you in the car ride on the way here, uh, I'm full of gratitude. And as we go forward in this conversation, I'm going to pour more and more gratitude on you. Uh, when we were on our way here from the Network State conference, I saw how much you were hounded. People just want to come up and say that they love you. Uh, this takes me back to that Joe Rogan episode you did in 2019. Are you aware of how many young men's lives that episode affected? I have no idea why, to be honest. I feel like I just said the same things I was saying. They're kind of obvious. And maybe, uh, don't be so easily influenced. Really? Yeah. Think for yourself, you know? Decide for yourself, you know? How I look at it. So, in 2019, I was 26, running four businesses parallel, getting extremely stressed out. But those two hours of that episode created switches in me. And my journey from age 26 to age 31 has been much more lubricated, especially from a mental health perspective. So you've done a lot for the mental health of many men all over the world. How, how much do we really figure out ourselves, right? There's like, there's, what are the different kinds of knowledge? This is worth thinking through, right? I'm just thinking it through with you. So, there's knowledge from direct experience, right? You experience something, and that generates knowledge inside of you. There's knowledge that you pick up from other sources. You're just a vessel that's passing through you. You picked it up, you synthesize it, you regurgitate. There's, uh, knowledge that you create, which is rare. Um, um, I don't know if I said anything original. Really? Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. But I think you accumulated a lot of data which is backed by years of reading and research. I think if I were to look back, I would say that the only true knowledge I have is the knowledge that is, uh, directly verified by me and, uh, fits in with the other pieces. So I view myself as a very basic thinker, really. Yeah. I don't view myself as an advanced thinker. I'm not an expert in anything. But what I like to do is everything that comes my way, I like to deeply understand it as simply as possible. I have to be able to put it in simple words and simple frameworks and simple concepts. And I have to be able to do it, uh, almost visually in my mind. And exponentially, have to map it to some experience that I have. And then I have to be able to take that, and I have to be able to plug it into something else I understand. It has to fit in a steel frame of understanding at the basics of knowledge. Uh, so, for example, mathematics. I was never very good at mathematics. I wanted to be a physicist, but I, I wasn't good at calculus. But my basic math is really, really good. Um, the same way, I don't have the largest vocabulary, but I have a very solid vocabulary, and I can be very precise with my words, even when I speak. I'm not the fastest speaker, I'm not the slowest speaker. So I think for me, it's just about, I don't take. There's a great, uh, motto from the Royal Society, which was the Society of scientists in, uh, Britain during their Enlightenment era. And, uh, the motto of the Royal Society is "Nullius in verba." I'm sorry if I'm mangling the Latin, but it means "take no one's word for it." And I love that. Take no one's word for it. So I think, uh, we are encouraged these days to take in knowledge, pour it into our heads like a bucket, and we regurgitate it, and we use fancy words to cover up what we don't mean, what we don't know. And I don't accept that. Unless I understand something at its core fundamental level, I don't understand it. And then beyond that level, I get bored. I don't care to understand it. So I think just being able to be very particular about what you take in, make sure you truly understand it, and that it is true. Truth is the most important thing, because if you're going ahead with falsehoods because they're convenient, you're just going to walk around bumping your head against reality and wondering why it hurts. So it's important to just always look for the truth, figure it out for yourself, make sure it fits into your understanding, be open to revising it, because you're always wrong. It's just a question of how wrong you are. Uh, and then using that to, uh, find the commonalities in life and, and navigate it. And I think that's why, uh, you're better off asking someone like me about very basic things, uh, than about very advanced things.

Can I ask you a basic question? Sure. Yeah, please. What's the meaning of life? We talk about this for hours. I think about it all the time. I think about it. I, I want to kind of reframe it a little bit. Sure. Yeah. Uh, what's new right now in life for you? It's been five years since that Joe Rogan episode, and we got to know you so deeply then. Yeah. But what's happened in the last five years? I don't, I don't, I don't, uh, retrospect on myself. I don't think about myself. That's what's new. No, no. I just don't. I, I couldn't tell you because I don't think about myself. I don't think about what's changed in my life, and if my life is good or bad, or if this happened or that happened. And I don't look at all photos of me, and I don't think about old trips, and I don't think about people that are gone. You know, I don't, I don't think about the past. I just don't live in the past at all.

Do you pray? Not in the traditional sense, no. Uh, I think prayer implies some kind of an external entity that I'm asking something for. And sure, like every person, I might have done that here or there. Um, usually we're fair-weather friends with any God that's out there, right? When we need help, we're like, "All prayer." And when we don't, we're like, "Everything's good. It's all me," right? So, no, I don't, I don't pray in the traditional sense. Uh, but I am very deeply, I hate the word, but it's spiritual, right? And I would define spiritual in a negative way. It just means not mental, not physical, right? So, but why do you hate the word? Because it's overloaded with a lot of religiosity. Um, all of a sudden, you're supposed to be a spiritual being. You're supposed to do yoga. You're supposed to meditate. And you're supposed to sit cross-legged. And you're supposed to, you know, then you argue about, is the Bhagavad Gita or the Ashtavakra Gita or the, you know, all of these roads lead to the same place. Um, the, the, the best way I would summarize my thinking on this is that I think existence itself is a miracle. The oldest questions are, why is there something instead of nothing? Why are we here? What's the meaning of life? These are all just variants in the same question. And there is no answer to that. Does that mean there can never be an answer to that? No, not necessarily. But if you start going down that road, you'll find all kinds of contradictions. For example, with just the meaning of life, right? If there was a single meaning of life, then we would all be slaves to it. Suppose the meaning of life was to help others, and we would all be running around trying to help others, and, you know, there'd be no room for the individual. If the meaning of life was to, you know, be strong and fit and healthy, then we'd all be working out. Um, we'd all be, I don't know how beer and biceps go together, but, you know, we'd all be building our biceps. So it's better that there is no overarching singular meaning of life. It's better that there are personal interpretations. Got. Um, however, within those personal interpretations, you know, we, we all have, even though we have complete freedom to choose any meaning that we want, and we can create our own meaning at any moment, um, there are certain common things in what we all want as well. And so that's kind of the paradox of being a human individual, where you're completely an individual, but you're also completely interlinked to everything and anything that exists. You couldn't change, you couldn't change a particle in the universe without changing this moment, right? Not in any meaningful way. Um, although that's not entirely true, there are error-correcting mechanisms built into the structure of the universe. So, uh, but a lot of things had to conspire in a very particular way to bring us here together today, right? Um, so in that sense, everything is very interconnected. On the other hand, my life is, and your lives are, single-player games inside our heads, you know? We interpret everything from birth to death. Uh, your experience of, uh, your experiences are singular to you. No one will truly ever understand you or get you. And you're always searching for that unity, that connection, that, that going back to, you know, oneness, source, togetherness, whatever you want to call it, community. There's many words for it. In terms of, uh, you know, back to meaning of life, the way I think of it is that existence itself is a miracle, and everything else is science. And I think that's the best of all possible worlds. So spirituality is a side that lies on what, who am I? Why am I here? How long have I got? What am I here for? And these are questions that are really only answerable at a personal level. This miraculous little world that we're in is beautifully put together. I couldn't, I couldn't do a better job, for sure. For sure. I couldn't even begin to do the job. And just to give you some ideas as to, you know, just some observations, how well it's put together. The fact that science works, that's magic. Technology works, that is magic. You go back and you read books on magic or magicians or fantasy books, they don't have a hundredth of the power that we have. They don't have self-driving cars. They don't have smartphones. They don't have antibiotics. They don't have rockets. Um, they don't even have fantasy novels. They don't even have clean running water. They don't have reliable food. They don't have food delivery services, right? Uh, so we are already living in an age of miracles. That the best part is we can control. And the magic spells that we cast are under the auspices of science. The wizardry that we create is through technology. And that's all manipulable through laws and and rules and systems that we discover and we discover and we create. And that is incredible. We're all magicians. I wouldn't, I couldn't ask for a better system. If an actual miracle showed up afterwards, suppose somebody showed up and turned, uh, loaves into fish or water into wine, that would destroy our world. Because all of a sudden, you'd be like, "Oh my God, there's all these rules for this new thing that we don't understand how it works." So now science is junk. And you wouldn't know how to navigate the world. And now you'd be at the mercy of demons and angels and spirits. And you'd be running around worshiping and praying. Then you would pray because you'd be like, "How do I make sense of this world?" So I think we live in the best of all possible worlds.

Okay, uh, I think the geography that one grows up in definitely determines their mindset in life to a large degree. And, uh, personally, my take on spirituality is affected by growing up in India. You read books like "The Autobiography of a Yogi," you read the life of the Buddha. I definitely feel that there's a higher stage of consciousness, and I don't feel like we've reached the final state of evolution. Uh, there is definitely an endpoint which is also beyond the next stage of evolution. Uh, and I do believe that, you know, you say that a calm mind is earned. MH. I think that's one of the steps on the ladder. And then there's like higher stages. Mhm. I, I don't know how useful it is to prognosticate about where humanity is headed unless you get there yourself first. And, and you don't have the ability to do anything for anyone unless you embody it yourself. Uh, so, so to the extent that you think humanity is headed there, I say get there first and then show them the way. I definitely think that Naval Ravikant is already on that ladder as compared to other human beings. I have no idea where I'm on that ladder. You don't think you're slightly more evolved? No. I, I don't. That's a loaded question. Uh, first of all, I don't think of myself. I just want to be clear on that. And that's not a rule, it's just a habit I've kind of developed because I found that thinking about yourself is a source of all unhappiness and misery. Really? Yes. Self-obsession is the root of all unhappiness. What did Buddha do? Conquer the self. What does that mean? Means that he saw through the illusion of the separate self. What did Buddha think about himself? Not for an instant. You know, anyone that you think of as an enlightened being does not think about themselves for an instant. The happiest people in life, when people are their best, is because, uh, they love something more than they love themselves. They love their children, they love God, they love their mission, what have you. And all misery comes from rumination, from sitting around being depressed, going in circles in your own head about "me, me, me, me." It is a disease. And, uh, you need a concept of a "me" to be effective and to keep track of things. You have a memory, you have certain predictions, your personality patterns. But the more you self-obsess, the less happy you're going to be. I guarantee you that. And I'm not doing, I'm not saying I don't think about myself to be happy. I can't even tell you why I don't think about myself. I think it just comes from having thought through a lot of things, and then just, I, I get interested in topics and concepts and ideas and understandings. And the more that I sort of focus that way, the less I just end up thinking about myself. So even like, you know, people ask me, "Oh, how's your day going?" I'm like, "I have no idea." I don't think about it. Really? Yeah. Good. Maybe if I'm really tired, I'll say, "Okay, I'm tired." You know, if something really bad happened, like, "Oh, it wasn't a great day." But most of the time, I couldn't even tell you my own state of mind, okay? Because I'm not interested in it. I don't think it's interesting. It's interesting for us. And I'll give you some perspective here. Yeah. We were one of the first podcasts in India, currently the biggest. And I feel that's an outcome of constantly tearing apart people's chests, getting into their hearts, and getting to know them. Because in India, we're emotional people, and we want to know the emotions of others. We want to know what's in other people's minds. Or it's dumb luck because you started early. I'm just kidding. Or, or that, of course not. I'm just joking with you. Luck is definitely a part of me. I mean, look, luck favors the prepared. Uh, Joe Rogan is incredibly successful because he was doing podcasting before his podcasting. He was the top guy on Ustream, which was just like a streaming thing on the internet before podcasting came along. So, uh, there's a certain kind of person that it takes to be early. You make your own luck in that sense. I actually, luck is, luck is one of those things that you shouldn't believe in, even if it's true, because believing it will hurt your agency. Just like victim mentality, right? Thinking you're a victim, even if it's true, don't believe it because it'll just hurt your agency. Because you have no power as a victim. You have no power if things are up to luck. Uh, whatever power you have in life comes from believing that you can change things and do things. And even if you can't change the outside, you can at least change the inside. No one controls your mind but you. Um, so, yeah, it's, it's not luck. I was joking. Talking. The question I have for you is, while all of us sit in India and view Naval Ravikant ruling the internet in so many ways, uh, a lot of Indians feel very proud, okay, to see someone from India, uh, you know, who shares genetics with us, kind of kill it on a world stage. So I've had this thought experiment lately as I've been researching for this episode. I thought to myself that what if Naval's parents didn't leave India and what if he was in Delhi? I'm pretty sure you'd still, uh, take up some form of entrepreneurship, knowing your personality, because I think there's some traits that don't change. But then there's a lot that changes because of geography. I, I wonder if you've ever thought of that reality: if your parents didn't leave India, uh, and go to the US, how would your life be different, according to you? I don't, I don't want to downplay geography at all. I actually think where you live is the single most important decision you make. Uh, but the first part of that is making a decision. Uh, I like to think that even if my parents had not immigrated to the US, I would have probably done so at a later age because I was ambitious, uh, and I wanted to be around smart people, and I wanted to build things. Uh, when I immigrated to the US, I was not in any position to go to Silicon Valley and build things. I had to kind of, you know, claw my way there. Um, and I got there a little later than I should have, frankly. But at any given time in the world's history, there's usually only one or two places that really matter in terms of moving the world forward. So there was a time when it was Athens in ancient Greece. There's a time when it was Florence in Italy. There's a time when it was, uh, London in the United Kingdom. And the, the time when I was kind of coming into my formative years, it was Silicon Valley. And I knew that I, the first time I used an Apple computer, it was an old Macintosh in, uh, the computer room in my high school. I just fell in love with it. And I, and I just knew that I had to get closer to, uh, Apple. That that was the thing that pulled me in. When I got to Silicon Valley, the first thing I did was with my bags, I went in a taxi straight from the airport to Apple's headquarters, and I wandered around. Um, and I'd read this book by Guy Kawasaki called "The Macintosh Way" that was very inspirational to me. So at some point, if you are, if you have high agency, if you're a person that's self-motivated, which I think almost everybody watching this is, um, you will end up where you're meant to go. It's just going to take some effort. The universe drops plenty of opportunity around you, but it's not necessarily on your head, and you have to walk over there and pick it up. Your podcast didn't build itself, for example. Counterfactuals are impossible to do. Like, uh, yes, if you had gone, if you had immigrated to the US early, you'd probably be doing a podcast in the US. Um, or, uh, you know, if you weren't born a podcaster, you found your way to being a podcaster. So even though yes, there's luck involved, there's counterfactuals involved, there's immigration involved, don't believe that stuff, you know? It's better to, uh, just kind of take responsibility, both externally and internally. Externally for what you managed to do, and internally for how you feel about it. Uh, like one of my little tweets to myself, and all the good ones are to myself, was: "I and I alone am responsible for everything I think and feel." Um, so, for example, if I get mad at somebody about something, it's my fault. Why am I mad? Why am I making myself angry? Um, why can't I just deal with the same situation in a cool, calm, and collected way? Why do I have to show, or not even show, why do I have to lose control? Because anger is a loss of self-control. Why, why am I still so broken inside that that happens? So I, I kind of reject this line of questioning, to be honest.

You know what if, what if, what if? Who cares? What if? We're here. Um, you constantly talk about that steel framework thing. You say that, learn the first principles. Yes. Um, while we were at the event, a lot of the people backstage were like, "Ask Naval about how he achieved this level of clarity." And I understand that you focus on first principles thinking, but what's underneath that thought? Like, did you read a book at some point in life that pointed you towards it? No, no, no, no, no. I think, uh, when I was young, my dad wasn't around much, and he was gone. He had to, he immigrated to the US before the rest of us did. It took four years where he could pull us there. And then my parents went through divorce and so on. So one good thing was I never had anybody telling me what to do, ever. Um, and I had to figure everything out for myself. And I think that helps a lot. It makes you very high agency. Um, I also, nobody in my, like my aunts and my mom, they loved us to death, but there was nobody saying, "This is right, that's wrong, do it this way, don't do it that way." So you figure it out for yourself. And it started with reading, but eventually just goes to thinking. But I don't think there's anything special. I, I think, I think deep down, everybody wants to understand things, right? Everybody wants to learn. Everyone's curious. All children are curious. Any young child, they'll be asking questions all day long. And I think the trick is just don't stop asking questions and keep asking questions until you can answer something to your own satisfaction. Um, maybe I had the luxury of the time to read, you know, that's helpful because it helps answer questions when you're younger. At least some, some reading. A lot of, too much reading, or reading the wrong things, can be bad too, right? Because you can stuff your head with the wrong things. I, I, I guess for for decades, I did not feel like I was that smart because what would happen is I would talk to somebody, and they'd say, "Well, there's this and that, and there's this," and they would just start using big terms and big words and defining huge things. And it took me a long time to figure out they didn't know what they were talking about. If someone's using a lot of big words, you know, it's the mark of a charlatan to explain simple things in a complex way. And, uh, it's a mark of a genius like Richard Feynman to explain complicated things in simple ways. The smartest people actually understand what they're talking about, so they can explain it in plain English. They don't need to resort to abstractions. They don't need to impress. And a lot of times, with abstractions, they're leaky. You poke at them, and it doesn't quite map, or it doesn't mean what, what they think it means. Um, I'd rather like to stick. And I'm a failed physicist. I wanted to be a physicist. So, and my math wasn't good enough, plus I wanted to make money, so it didn't work out. But, uh, I was surrounded by a lot of physicists, and I read a lot of physics. And so I felt dumb compared to the other physicists. And so I, well, you're not going to trick a physicist. You're not going to walk in and start talking physics and then suddenly, like, you say something that's wrong, they're going to call you on it. Physics is very rigorous. And same thing with computer science, which I did end up studying. Is the code has to compile, the code has to run, the code has to work. You can't, you can't trick the machine using words. And so I think having a grounding in scientific disciplines, around scientific people, forces you to be rigorous and humble about your actual sphere of knowledge. Uh, you can't bluff people. Systems in which you get feedback, like real feedback, free markets and nature, right? You can't trick nature. I can't lie to nature. Uh, and I can't trick free markets, all end up broke. So these systems give you very good feedback, and they force you into being rigorous. Um, but it's very easy to trick people. So if you're in politics, if you're in law, if you're in journalism, if you're in media, uh, if you're just, you know, BSing with your friends, it's very easy to trick people, and then you get social rewards. You don't get the negative feedback. And that gets baked into your personality, your identity, your way of thinking. Uh, so I think I was fortunate enough to be scientifically, uh, to get scientific feedback and to be pushed back upon through science and scientific people. Uh, also grew up in a tough environment, so it was a no-BS environment. You had to be correct. So, you know, when you're trying to survive, you have to be correct. When you have an abundance of resources and things are easy, you don't have to be right, because you, there's cushions everywhere in the environment for you. Um, so maybe I was forged that way. But like I said, I don't, I don't introspect much. I don't, it doesn't really matter to me. It's ancient history. All that matters is here, because this is all there is.

So let's talk about the Hein now. Yeah. Uh, you're 50 now. Yeah. Has your definition of love changed at all? Love is just, it's one of these overloaded words. It's like freedom, you know? It means anything you want. But what does love mean? Okay. I, I think, so what is love? Okay. This romantic love, which we're all familiar with. Bollywood thrives on that, right? That's that's an attachment thing. It's like, "I love you if you love me." Let's go have kids together. Yes. This is biological programming. It's there. It's important. It's good to have. That's not the real love. Or you love like a fanboy, like how all of us love you. Yeah. Love, love is a feeling of unity. It's the, it's the attraction to yourself, actually. It is seeing yourself in something else and then kind of wanting to complete with it. Um, so you can have a spiritual love, which is a love for oneness or God. You can have a love for your children because they're just part of you. You can have a love for your community because it's it's like you. You can have love for your ideas. So love is attraction in that sense. It's like a, it's a positive attraction where you, you see the unity in the thing with you, and you don't necessarily want anything out of it. And you know, that's a, that's a genuine love. Um, the nice thing about love is, if you think back in your life to when you were loved a lot, right? Like you were loved by your parents. Great. Wonderful to be loved by your parents. Some point, you took it for granted. Let's be honest. We all take our parents for granted. That's one of the things you learn as a parent yourself. You're like, "Oh my God, my parents put up with all of this. They were saints, right?" Um, you, you really only start valuing your parents when you have your own children. Then you realize what a one-way relationship that love relationship. And it's fine. That's the way it's meant to be. Even your parents, they want what's best for you. They want you to love your kids, not to love them back at the same level. So, uh, one of the things you learn about love is, okay, when you're receiving love, you take it for granted. And it can even be a little too much. Like, for example, someone's attracted to you, and you're not attracted to them. You're like, right, the overzealous fan. You know, the girl, the guy who's like chasing you around, you're like, "I don't really know. I'm not really into this." So that kind of love is the love that we think we want, but we don't really. I mean, yes, we want a little bit of it so we don't feel completely alone, and it makes us feel safe. But it's not really the love that you want. Now, think back to when you were in love. When you're in love with an idea, how you just work on it passionately. When you're in love with, let's say, God or spirituality, how you're just taken, and you're, you're, you're swept away. Or when you're even in love with a person, you're in love with a woman, or you're in love with a man, and all of a sudden, everything is brighter, and everyone's happier, and you're just like walking on Cloud Nine. The feeling of being in love is greater than the feeling of being loved, is my point. Okay? And you can be in love anytime you want. And how do you be in love? Well, you can't be forced, right? You can't buy love. You can't force love. But I will say, a commonality is generally the less you are thinking about yourself, going back to what I was saying earlier, the more you're going to be able to love other people and other things. So, for example, the Buddhas, uh, you know, I, you know, people will sometimes say, "Well, that's not a Buddha because that person is not loving enough." Well, that's, that's not necessarily true. Love is not a requirement for being a Buddha, but it is an output of being a Buddha. Because a Buddha is a person who has seen through the illusion of the separate self. Uh, and once they've seen through the illusion of the separate self, they're no longer self-obsessed. And therefore, their love that was earlier turned inwards and became ego love for the self, went outwards. And it still flows. Uh, as a very simple example, you know, here's something I, uh, uh, is a little embarrassing, but I'll be vulnerable. You like vulnerability, right? So I, I, I kind of sometimes have these near-death exercises, right? Where it's just like I imagine myself dying. And it's not something that I do deliberately, it just kind of happens. The, the moments when you go into bed, but before you fall asleep, are really interesting because your mind goes into a really hazy, almost psychedelic state. And, and I used to meditate a lot. And somewhere along the way, I just found that state between sleeping and waking to be really entertaining. Entertaining? Entertaining. Yeah. It's just entertaining. So next time you're falling asleep, just make a, just, just the smallest effort because if you make any real effort, you'll fall, you won't be able to sleep. But make the smallest effort just to be aware of your thoughts as you're falling asleep, as you're going to sleep. And your thoughts start going wackier and wackier and wackier. And they will just get wild. Like I'll have cats talking to me, and, you know, just like weird stuff going in and out. Just, it's like dreams. You're, you're basically lucid dreaming as you're falling asleep. And they're the craziest dreams. They don't make any sense. It's all nonsense. You observe your own thoughts as you're about to fall asleep. As I'm about to fall asleep, that's when that's when your thoughts start going off the rails. You stop thinking about like, "What am I doing tomorrow?" and "How to work go today?" and you just start having these wacky, random connections in your head. And it can be really fun to watch. I was doing it just as an entertainment thing, an exploratory thing. What have you found out? I'm not looking to find anything. So I think that's part of curiosity. You have to be a little careful because if you go looking for something in particular, then you're only open to seeing that thing. And that's not how you find anything that's true. Um, but it, it's just pure mere curiosity. It's, it's an entertaining state. That's, that's a fine reason to do it, right? We do everything because we enjoy it at the end of the day. If you didn't, you wouldn't do it, right? Or you want to not enjoy it, but you do it because you want to. Um, so I did it just because I wanted to. And once in a while, once in a while, and I'm not trying to suggest anything because again, if I suggest something, then it's not going to happen for you, but, you know, I'll basically feel like I'm dying. So I'm falling asleep, but I feel like I'm dying. It's like you can see things fading out, right? And as you fall asleep, the French, uh, no, that's not. They call orgasm the petite mort, "the little death," right? But, uh, but it's also because your mind shuts down, right? So what's happening is your, your mind is shutting down from waking to sleeping state. And that's kind of a death transition. You can kind of feel like you're dying. And you can literally see thoughts going offline. Your mind goes offline. And as your mind goes offline, pay attention to what remains. Pay attention to what actually remains. And don't be afraid of it. Don't be afraid. You're just falling asleep. But like I said, sometimes it feels like you're dying. And don't be afraid of death, right? You just kind of go with it. It's what's just what's happening. And then as your mind disappears, as things disappear, as things fade out of existence, see what remains. Okay? There's a version of something like this that I do for me. The last two thoughts are always the girl I'm seeing, and or, uh, the God I know. MH. Which is just universal energy. Yeah. These are all manifestations of what you would call love, right? This is, this is you stop thinking about yourself because thoughts are what drive the self-obsession. The self is ultimately just a thought. It's a, it's a, the self is a thought that "I am a separate creature. I'm a body. I'm a mind." And if you truly were not thinking, like you're in deep meditation, or you're on a psychedelic, or you're a Buddha, you wouldn't have a thought of the self. And you would just be. You just be. Be aware. That's all that's all there is.

I think the difference in your state of consciousness and mine is one, you're much older and you've seen life. And by older, I mean brain older, not physical body older. You're a wiser human being. And I think over the years, you've just learned to observe and pick up data from everywhere. Uh, my early life experiences kind of catered me towards a deep sense of what we call Bhakti in India, which is, uh, nishkam prema, or unselfish love towards the divine. It's just an outcome of living in India, in my eyes. Yeah. No, I, I, what matters is truth, not who says what, or what, where you lived, or what book you read. What just matters is what's true, and that you can figure out for yourself. And you can figure it out just as well as me. And you probably have. Your, your core experience of of your awareness is the same as mine. Every emotion you felt, I felt. Every emotion I felt, you felt. We're human. No human experience is alien to us. So we can have all the same feelings and thoughts, just in different levels and different bases. Um, I, I, I sort of reject this idea that I'm wiser or more advanced. I don't think that's true. No. If I was wise, I'd be a Buddha. I'm not. So it's like, you know, two ants debating like, you know, who's smarter. And there's like, there's like a human walking around over there, right? What does it matter? Okay. Not in our eyes, because for a lot of dudes in their 20s and 30s, you are what we want to become, especially from a peace perspective. I'm the same guy I've always been. And I wouldn't even say I'm that peaceful. My mind is a wreck, really. Yeah. I'm always, like, my mind's always running all over the place. It's, it's, it's always active. You know how you said that happiness is peace in motion? Mhm. That's something that stayed with me over the years, and it's something I practiced. The person who's going to know the most about weight loss is the person who was fat as a kid. The person who's going to know the most about peace and happiness is the one who was the most miserable inside. So don't take from anything I write to say that I'm some peaceful Zen Buddha inside. I'm not. My mind still runs out of control. It's, I'm a crazy person. I'm a, I'm a crazy person who's trying to be a little less crazy and observing my own craziness. That, that's how I can come back to you and say, like, you know, when I started tweeting a lot, uh, about anything other than technology. So I, I, you know, I was an investor in Twitter early on, small investor in 2007. And Twitter really launched and started getting big around 2010. Not even big, it was still small, but I was active on Twitter from the start. But around 2012, 2013, I was going through a tough period. And that's when I started tweeting, uh, the stuff that I was supposed to tweet. And I, you know, I started getting feedback from people in the environment who were like, "Hey, that's weird. You're like a VC, you're like an entrepreneur. People not going to trust you. They think you're strange. Are you high?" You know, that was like a constant, uh, thing. And I was just like, "I, I don't care. I'm just writing to myself." Right? And, and I was writing down my crazier and crazier thoughts. Uh, and I, for a long time, I got no positive feedback on it. Which is fine. It's actually fine because if you, if you're doing it for positive feedback, you're eventually going to end up doing the wrong, the wrong thing, right? I like burning my audience. I like, occasionally, I'll tweet things that I don't completely believe that are a little incendiary because I want to find all the people who get easily triggered so I can block them. Uh, I just want to blow them out. I don't care about followers. Followers are worthless, right? If easy mechanism to adjust your friend list. Yeah. If you're, if you're doing anything for followers, your followers are worthless. Uh, you know, who would you have rather follow you? 10 people that you respect, that are intelligent and interesting and wise, or like a million monkeys? So the, the follower count thing is utterly worthless. And I don't even want followers. I only want peer relationships. Um, because follower is kind of a weird thing. Now, this person's not thinking for themselves. And no, what, what every intelligent person craves is other intelligent people, right? To help things, things through. Um, and to kind of bond with. But, um, I don't know where I was going with this, but yeah, screw followers anyway. Yeah. I was, I was tweeting, and I was tweeting like the craziness in my mind, right? I was, I'm a crazy person. And so I was just going through my own head and trying to sort out my own thoughts. And it's a complete mess. And, uh, it turns out that we all have the same internal thoughts, and we all have the same internal experiences. We all do. We have them in different order, maybe we interpret different things from them, but we all have the same feelings. So every time I put out some late-night tweet with some crazy thought, you know, people around the world would just be like, "Yeah, I'm thinking that too." Um, I forget who said this. There was a great line that I read a long time ago, but it was something like, oh, I think it was Emerson. Uh, and he said, you know, "In every genius, we see our own ordinary thoughts, but they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty." Right? So it's, it's just the willingness to say it, combined with saying it in an interesting way. So what I realized was that what I liked about Twitter, it was like an open journal, which forced me to craft my thoughts. It would give me feedback, obviously, because people will come out and correct you, even if you're correct. And what I enjoyed writing was, I liked saying things that I thought were true, that were novel to me in that moment. Obviously, anything I can think of, somebody else has probably thought of, with very few exceptions. So it was something novel to me, something that was true, and I would say it in an interesting way so that I would remember it. Uh, and because I read a lot as a kid, I tried writing. I wasn't, I didn't have the patience to be a long-form writer. I wrote a few blog posts and never even wrote a book. And I tried poetry, um, because I like reading poetry, but I didn't care to learn meter and rhythm and rhyme.

I just cared about the words and the and how evocative they were. And so, Twitter was a perfect medium for me. It allowed me to be to use word selection and simple framing and explanation to really hone down things that I thought to be true and were interesting to me and write them as notes to myself.

And to this day, like every day, I go on Twitter and someone's quote-tweeted me on something, or there's like some bot that's like thrown up a bot quote. And I look at them, I'm like, "Oh, I should follow that advice. Damn, that was good. Like, that was written to me. That's a note to self from me from five years ago. I should take my own advice." It's kind of like you're growing up in front of the world.

Yeah, it's and we're all always growing up, right? We're all, we're all always on this journey of self-discovery. This single-player game where we're alone inside, but yet we're deeply interconnected because we're all having the same thoughts, the same emotions, the same experiences with maybe different interpretations, often the same interpretations.

The great questions in life, the meaning of life, or, you know, what am I doing here? Or what should I do? Uh, they all have paradoxical answers. Uh, so, for example, you know, does life have any meaning? Uh, I could say, no, life is meaningless. You, you arrive with nothing, you die, nothing survives, you don't remember anything. As far as you're concerned, the moment you close your eyes the last time, the entire universe disappears. It's like a dream that never happened. Poof. No meaning. Okay.

On the other hand, I could say, actually, life has infinite meaning. Uh, every moment is connected to every other moment. You can, this is the only thing that actually exists. Uh, you can ascribe complete and utter meaning to it, right? Uh, another question you ask is, am I alone? And yeah, of course, you're completely alone. No one else knows your thoughts. You're a single point of awareness. Nobody else can have that same point of awareness. And any two points are infinitely different in space.

On the other hand, it could say, no, of course, you're not alone. The entire universe had to conspire to bring you here at this moment. It's all particle collisions from the Big Bang till now. And then, poof, here you are. And, uh, how can you, and everything that you do is a function of your environment and your genes, neither of which you selected. So you're not alone. You're just, you're, you're part of everything. You're, you're an indispensable part of everything.

So all of these great questions have paradoxical answers. Uh, and that's one of the ways that, you know, you're dealing with one of the great questions. Uh, and it turns out, you know, if you think it through, the reason when, when you see these paradoxes, often what you'll find is that the question is being asked, you know, "What is the meaning of life?" but then it's being answered at two different levels.

And one level is a level of the individual, separate self, which says, "Oh, the meaning is just what I ascribe to it." Um, and then sometimes you answer, there's a sleight of hand, and you answer it at the level of the universal self, where you say, "Well, of course, you know, the meaning is the universe, or the meaning is life itself."

Um, or like, "Am I alone?" If you answer that at the individual level, then the answer is yes. If you answer at the universal level, the answer is no. So the paradoxical answers come from, do you choose to take, do you choose to adopt the viewpoint of yourself as a separate person, or do you take the viewpoint of your spiritual self? Uh, and we jump between those, those contradictions very loosely without paying attention, and we end up with these paradoxical answers, and we think the question is not solvable.

But that's not entirely true. It is solvable. It's just, which level are you speaking from? So, for example, going back to the Buddha, a Buddha, not *the* Buddha, but *a* Buddha, any Buddha, any enlightened person, they don't have any sense of persistent separate self. And so they're always answering at the universal level. And in that sense, they're freed of contradictions. And I think the reason we admire those people is because we ourselves want to be freed of this internal contradiction.

Bohr has had a great saying that, uh, "In every human, there is a sense that something infinite has been lost." Wow. And I love that phrase. Uh, because to me, that's kind of, if, if I think about kind of what's going on here, right? I can't prove it, so at the end of the day, you should figure it out for yourself. But I think what's going on here is that there is a universal self, which is just raw awareness. And that's all there is. Everything in your experience is awareness.

In my eyes, based on what I've read and learned through the show, uh, I feel like Hinduism explores exactly this question. What is the infinite self? Yeah. Hinduism gets closer than anybody else. But any "ism" isn't going to quite get you there because it's an individual thing. You know, the word "Hinduism" is not, like, by modern-day Hindus, we refer to it as Sanatan Dharma, which is like the eternal faith. Yeah. And what I like about Hinduism is that it lets kind of everybody find their own way. And you can pick your God, you can pick your path. It's a buffet. Yeah. It's a buffet.

And but it has to be, because there are as many paths as there are people. Uh, and because you create an individual story, right? There's kind of an awareness or a consciousness. Everything that you experience, experience is in this awareness. It arises in the awareness. It's probably made of awareness. It's known by awareness. So what else is there? Everything is intermediated through your awareness. And then on top of that, you layer your identity, and your body, and your problems, and your issues, and your achievements, and your desires. And then eventually, you unlayer all of that, and you lose that, and you go back to this undifferentiated awareness, which has kind of always been around. It's a hypothesis. I don't know if it's true. A lot of people say it.

You know, um, and I do read a lot of old Indian texts. Oh, really? Yeah. Well, like, I'm a fan of, uh, obviously everyone says Bhagavad Gita, but I like the Ashtavakra Gita. If you've read that one? That's, yeah. Didn't expect you to say that. No, Ashtavakra is amazing. Uh, Vasistha's Yoga, which has a lot of the enlightenment stories. Herman Hesse wrote that book Siddhartha, which is kind of a fictionalized Buddha story.

Um, but, you know, then I've read, you know, Raja Yoga and Autobiography of a Yogi and all that stuff. Osho, Krishnamurti, blah, blah, blah. De Llo. Michael, if, if it's, I got into what would call enlightenment porn. And I tracked down about a dozen of these people in real life, and I interviewed them, and I met them, I spent time with them, and I meditated, and I did all that stuff. But the conclusion I kind of came to is that you've got to figure it out yourself.

All that stuff is inspirational, but. And, uh, you can only kind of do it if you want to. Like, right now, I'm on YouTube and I'm watching, uh, old Krishnamurti talks. I'm watching Papa Muji, Rupert Spira, Ascendor, random YouTube videos. The guy has like 10 followers, but he's enlightened. The YouTube algorithm is really good. It finds enlightened good people if you just click around far enough.

Um, but obviously, at some level, I'm not fully serious about it because if I was serious about it, I would be there. But there is a greater truth out there. Again, this is a bit of a compliment to you in my eyes. Um, you're the definition of what a Sanatani is in terms of exploration and collecting knowledge and then coming to a conclusion about life and the divine yourself based on your own experiences and knowledge, then using the Shastras, the ancient books, as reference points. So that's just how I. I think we all want to know the truth. And there are little truths, and there are big truths, and there are bigger truths. And this is probably the biggest truth, right? And I did cheat. I skipped to the end. I looked at the answer. Might have been a mistake, to be honest, because the point is not to earn a PhD in enlightenment, actually be enlightened. Right? And so I don't know exactly how you get there. There doesn't seem to be a copyable path, but I'm still fascinated with it. My mind is still circling the drain on it.

Does the Mahabharat have any influence on your mind? I don't remember it too well. I, I think, now this is where I'm going to just offend a lot of people, but I think that's mostly historical. Thing. Obviously, everything, you know, old Indian mythology has a lot of spirituality woven into it, but no, it's not one that I've spent much time on. Okay. It's more the philosophies like the Ashtavakra Gita and all that. Yeah. I love the Ashtavakra Gita. It's incredible. The song of self-realization. Yeah. When you're reading that stuff. Yeah.

Is there a part of your DNA that feels stimulated being Indian? Everyone keeps trying to nail me on this, on being Indian. It's, it's, it's a very brown person thing to do. Well, I think I think we want a certain pride in being Indian, right? Because it was stripped off. Because it was stripped off. I think that's exactly right. And I sort of reject that it was stripped off. Really? In the sense that I'm just like, hey, I'm equally valid. I don't consider myself inferior to anyone. I don't consider myself superior to anyone. So in that sense, like, don't let them strip you in the first place that you have to then go needing it, fulfill it. And, and really, only the individual can, can truly transcend. Only the individual can rise above whatever is facing them.

So putting your faith in a group identity, you're sort of bound for disappointment. I mean, how many Indians are there? It's over a billion. Right? So there's going to be as many points of differentiation as there are commonality. It's not like all billion Indians link arms and march to the same thing. We're not, we're not ants.

So at least I approach it more from an individual level. I'm happy to be Indian. I have no objections with it. I think it's a rich culture. Uh, and I think it's, you know, helped me a lot. And half the books I read these days were written by Indians, you know, back in the day. Almost all the philosophy I read is Eastern philosophy.

Um, and the little bit of Western philosophy that I like, Schopenhauer and Emerson, were incredibly, and they were incredibly influenced by Eastern philosophy. They basically just cribbed Eastern philosophy and they put it in Western words. Right? Because Eastern philosophy has the virtue of being correct. It's true. Right? Right. One side says, well, you know, God has this shape, this skin color, this size, lived at exactly this time, and has exactly these rules. Like, skeptical. You know, the other side says, well, you are the self that you're looking for. It's all inside of you. You have to figure it out for yourself. And, you know, here are some practical steps that you can take towards self-realization. That seems more, you know, that seems more correct.

I think it's an outcome of just kind of being older. Like, you've had more time to contemplate. I think anyone who is highly truth-seeking will eventually find their way to Eastern philosophy, because it has the virtue of being true. Just like Western science has the advantage of being true. Okay? So Western physics. So when people talk about like, oh, we're going to have indigenous math. No, two plus two has to equal four. Right? Okay. We could be wrong, but I doubt it. That's our best theory right now that two plus two equals four.

So I look to Western for science, technology, advancement. By the way, the East is now starting to make strides there as well. Um, but when it comes to the oldest questions, the best answers are the oldest ones. Like, these, some of a lot of what we've been discussing has been around us questions since the dawn of mankind. So, and Indian civilization is one of the oldest civilizations. It's probably the oldest large civilization that explored these topics where we have written materials and records and practitioners and so on.

Um, and there's probably more Buddhas alive on the Indian subcontinent than there are anywhere else in the world. So if you're attracted to the truth of the old questions and you want to find the old answers, you're going to head there. This is natural. I think there are some problems with traveling in India, namely hygiene, and it's a little chaotic. But if one is ever seeking for the right answers in life, especially when it comes to these questions, India opens up certain portals in your head. It can be influential.

That said, if, if you can't figure something like that out exactly where you are, exactly when you are there, then it's not true. The truth is not something that's going to live in a certain region, at a certain place, at a certain time, and has to be told to you by a certain person, a certain way. That's not a truth. That's just another experience.

So anything that, because the whole point of spirituality is to be freed of the monkey mind and to be at peace in the moment. And so it can't be reliant on anything outside. It can't be, it can't be in the future. It can't be in a different place. You know, one of my problems that I have with all religions is this idea that like, oh, this is the word of God, and it was passed down through this book. Well, okay, well, what if I didn't speak that language? What if I was born at the wrong time? No, any fundamental truth that's spiritual has to be accessible to every human at every time, in every place, regardless of language, culture, religion, age, you know, gender, whatever. Or even physical being. Like, you could be, you could have mental retardation, you could be crippled, you could be dying. You should still be able to see and find and experience that same truth on your own. Otherwise, if it's, if it's brought to you from the outside, if it's temporal, it can be taken away from you.

And so I think the best path towards truth is understanding. Because when you deeply understand something, um, you're not going to un-understand it. It's the nature of truth that once you see it, once you learn it, you don't unlearn it because it's true. That's truth is indestructible knowledge in your mind. It can only be replaced by a better truth. It can only be replaced by, oh, okay, that was that truth wasn't complete. Here's another piece of the truth that I was missing. Um, but in that sense, truth cannot be destroyed. It can only be overruled by other truths. So if you find some understanding, then that can be with you forever.

Has marriage brought further understanding when it comes to life? I, I don't, marriage is fine. Household is great. I don't like to discuss personal life. Okay. I just don't think it's relevant to other people's lives. I, I will say like, uh, you know, I was talking about this earlier today, but my own favorite tweet to myself is, you know, "A fit body, a calm mind, and a house full of love. These things cannot be bought. They must be earned." And "house full of love" is is that part. And you can create a house full of love anytime you want by giving love.

That said, you know, marriage is complicated. It's a negotiation between people. You have to learn how to live together. You have kids. It's not easy. But I'm not the person to give marital advice. If only you will agree with it, it's too personal and every marriage is so unique. And even the concept of marriage is sort of going away in a lot of Western societies. Uh, uh, I do encourage children. I think children are amazing. Everyone should have kids. Yeah, absolutely. I don't understand this anti-natalist thing. We're here. I'm here because an unbroken chain of our ancestors from tadpoles to monkeys to now, you know, had children. Are you going to be the first ones to miss that branch? I mean, if you believe in some afterlife, all your ancestors looking down, you're saying, "Oh my God, I can't believe it. We struggled so hard. You know, we fought tigers, we crossed mountains, we froze during the ice ages, and this idiot just decided not to have children because he couldn't be bothered for the bad guy to stop this chain." Yeah, he's screwed up, right?

But I will tell you like, if, if you are older in life and you don't have the next generation to look forward to, then you better find God fast because I don't think like your own mind and your own life will be kind to you as you get older.

You know what I've learned about marriage from the outside? I'm not married yet, but this is conjectural, okay? I think one's wife is always right, and that's the rule one should follow. Yeah. See, I reject that completely. Yeah. People say like, "Happy wife, happy life." That's all propaganda. That's all feminine propaganda. You're being brainwashed. No, both people have to be equally happy. The secret to a happy relationship is two happy people. And you can't be happier than your spouse. So it's not "happy wife, happy life." It's "unhappy wife, unhappy life." You know? So, so you both have to be happy. Both of you have to work hard to make each other happy. You have to be a good fit and a good match. But the point of getting married is to have children. So, so you know, have the kids. And then, you know, worst case, you have kids, which is still an amazing outcome. And best case, you're happily married and you have kids. But I would, I don't buy the, you know, "keep the wife happy" propaganda. That's that's that's letting her shirk her duties. It's been kind, it's kind of you. Now, that approach would work if I asked your fiancé or girlfriend and she said, "Oh, my philosophy is like, you know, keep the husband happy at all costs." If she said that, then I would be like, "Okay, that's a good match. They're both trying to keep each other happy." But if it's all one-sided, no, that doesn't work.

Yeah, I mean, personally, I'm very Sanatani. Yeah. And Sanatan Dharma says the key to a happy relationship is, um, tolerance and selfless service. So those are the two kind of flagpoles I've got. After finding the right. That's good. If everybody follows it, you know, if both people are selfless and tolerant with each other, then it'll work out well. But you're not going to be in any voluntary relationship where you're selfless and tolerant, the other person's intolerant and selfish. It won't last. So you can only make those kinds. So those are good guidelines for society. They're not necessarily good guidelines for the individual.

As an individual, mate selection is a real thing. You have to pick a person who you're incredibly compatible with. You know, the traditional model is that the, you know, the man earns and creates, and the woman, uh, kind of takes care of the household. The man takes care of things outside, she takes care of things inside. That's a traditional model. I know in the West, it's falling out of favor, but it works. And in that model, the man has to be capable and do his duty, and the woman has to be kind and loving and, you know, take care of the household. And so that is a valid model of how the world works. And you can kind of, I don't know, Sanatan or whatever, you can have some prescriptions about how to run that. But the reality is life is very complicated. Every, every individual is completely unique. The combinatorics of human DNA are staggering. You'll never meet two people who are even vaguely alike.

If you leave a friend, you break up with a girlfriend, you lose a person in your life, a loved one, you're never going to find a substitute. You're never going to find anybody who's like the same or even close. Even close. Right? I've never met two human beings who are even vaguely similar, except perhaps identical twins, but that's theoretical. I don't know any up close that well. So if every person is unique, just imagine how unique every relationship is. So having other people navigate your relationship with hard and fast rules doesn't work. You can look to it for inspiration, you can look to it for principles, but each relationship has to work on its own merits.

And I am, I am a lazy person and I hate conflict. So my rule is, if a relationship has conflict, I just leave it. I don't fight with people. If somebody wants to fight with me, we get one fight, and then it's over. Because there's a lot of people out there. There's a lot of people out there, and life is long. So you have to navigate your way towards the people who love you for who you are, and you love them the way they are. Nobody needs anybody to change. And if they change, it's okay because you still kind of value the core, and you change together.

The same way, like you find, you have to navigate your way to the career, the job, the profession, the obsession where you like the thing for what it is. The moment is complete in of itself as you perform that act. And if you get some reward out of it, that's fantastic, but that's not the core reason you do it.

And the same way, I think you can apply that to every facet of your life. Even if you're eating, you want to find the healthy food that you actually enjoy eating. There are many healthy foods out there, just find the ones that you enjoy eating and just focus down on those. For exercise, find the sport or the hobby where you, it doesn't feel like work to you. Like play tennis, or, you know, if you like running, then go run. If you like lifting, then go lift. If you like playing tennis, then go play tennis.

So I think, uh, the beauty of modern life is it gives us so many options. And that's not a bad thing. Options are good. It's just you have to navigate your way through the options and find out what works for you, and then commit to that. And so on relationships, I don't view, and I know this is antithetical to the classical Indian way of arranged marriage, which had its merits. That was basically saying, "Hey, let's find someone who's culturally similar, socioeconomically similar, you know, worthy of you, and the purpose of marriage is to build a household and have children." So we'll take care of the basics. Didn't always work, but, you know, pretty good hit rate compared to modern where it's just like, "I'm going to marry my high school sweetheart," or "I'll roll the dice," or "Oh, I got this girl pregnant accidentally," and then off we go. So it can work better than some models.

But in a choice-based model, which is where Western society is, and I think increasingly Eastern society is, there, um, you have to be picky. So if you're having to sacrifice for your spouse and they're not sacrificing in return, just go somewhere else. If you're in constant conflict, then both of you need to go find someone who's, you're not, each of you is not going to be in constant conflict with. And I think that's a much better recipe. That, that ability to search and to look, and to cut your losses quickly, because there's high sunk cost in these relationships.

The biggest problem in relationships is dishonesty, where we're trying to make the other person happy, we're trying to appear our best. And so for the first year of the relationship, you just fake it. You just, you're just a different person. And sometimes that's just your emotions are driving you, and you're in love, so you're being on your best behavior without even thinking about it. And sometimes it's a little more deliberate. But the reality is the longer you fake it, the worse it's going to be. Because then you get trapped, and now it's sunk cost, and you don't want to walk away, and breaking that relationship is hard, and your friends and family expect you together, and you can't imagine life separately. And now you're stuck.

So it's just better to be brutally honest upfront about who you are and your needs and your worst sides and and all of that. And don't try to throw off any impressions because if eventually this person will see you at your worst, and eventually you will see them at their worst. So you might as well just start there.

You know, from the outside looking in, I personally have this impression of Naval Ravikant, the brand, and the human. And I feel like nothing hurts that guy. Does anything hurt you at all? You know, I'm a very paranoid person. So I do stress out about, you know, um, I grew up with very little, so I'm always stressing over like, like politicians and money. You know, like the West has now become very fashionable to hate money, to hate wealth, to hate entrepreneurs, to try to tear people down. We've turned into cancel culture, right? So yeah, so you know, those kinds of things occasionally stress me out.

But I would say that, there's there's not anything I want. Need is the ultimate monkey. Other than knowledge, right? I have not even that. Like, what is knowledge going to do for me? I'm going to die. It's all going to go to zero anyway. So it's fun. I enjoy learning things. I love the "aha" moment when I connect something together. And I would tweak it a little bit. I would say it's understanding, not knowledge. Knowledge is because knowledge gets conflated with memorization and, you know, memorizing facts. And I got ChatGPT for that and the internet.

So I enjoy understanding. I enjoy learning. My, my own tweet to myself on this was, "Spend your life in the company of geniuses, sages, children, and books." Right? Those are the four things that I enjoy the most. And there's a fifth thing. A great Indian podcaster. I thought you were going to say your wife or a woman. She's going to nail you on this one.

I, I think, not. There was, there was an old story that I liked about Socrates where they took him into, they took him into the equivalent of the mall, the market, and there were all these luxuries and fineries and things laid out and delicacies to eat. And he said, "There are so many things in this world that I do not want." And I was like, "Oh, that's power. That's it right there." Right? Or when Alexander the Great met Diogenes, who was living in a barrel. You know, Alexander was like, "I wish if I came back in their life, I could be like Diogenes." And Diogenes said something along the lines, "So, well, if I came back, I wouldn't want to be Alexander." Right? So being freed from need is the ultimate. But I'm not, I'm not a Buddha. I'm not the guy who's going to suddenly renounce everything and not have a need. And renunciation doesn't work anyway.

But it's more that, you know, I like games. I think we all like games. We all play games. We play the social game, we play the video games, we play the money games, we play the fitness game, we play the fame game, we play the love game, we play the happiness game. We all play games. And I've played a lot of games my whole life of every kind. And I've won a lot of games. And the reason to win the game is so you can be done with it, so you can see through it. If you just keep playing the same game over and over and over, grinding, you know, trying to go higher and higher and higher, maybe that works for somebody. It doesn't work for me. So I like to either see through games or I like to be done with them.

So I used to be an avid video gamer until very recently, actually. This is a couple of years back, maybe like five years ago. I probably spent more time playing video games than I spent working. Did it do anything for your mind? It was fun. Yeah, probably. I mean, it was, I was playing harder and harder games and more and more intellectual games and strategy games and war games and thinking games. But they're just games. They're meaningless games, right?

What was your favorite? There were so many. I mean, mostly war games. I was a, I was a deep war game. Magic: The Gathering, if you remember that game. You know, so anyway, the game doesn't matter. The point is I would just play lots and lots of games. And at some deep, deep level, I knew they were worthless because, you know, you're playing this game, and then you get some stupid reward at the end, and then they change the rules of that game, and then the game changes, and like, your reset, or like, you forgot your login, or you lost it because you upgraded your computer, or your, whatever, or this, they rolled out version five against a version four, you're starting all over, right? So, you know, it's worthless. You're just running in a circle, right? And all games are worthless because you die in the end. But at least some are longer-lived than others, right?

There are games that, like, for example, if I'm playing the wealth creation game, I can make money, which has an actual effect on my remaining life. As opposed to just playing a video game, which has none of that benefit. I'm not taking away from games. Games are useful. They're, they're training for the intellectual athlete, just like sports might be training for war for the physical athlete.

That said, I was still playing a lot of games. I knew they were kind of worthless. I was doing it to blow off steam, or just because, I don't even need a reason. I was, it was entertaining. But then one day I read a blog post, and, you know, truth is that when you see it, you can't unsee it. And this guy, in just the right turn of phrase, he called games a "shadow career." He said, "Games are a shadow career." And I was like, "Oh, that's so good. That is so good." It's like a career that you're building that's fake, you know? It's a shadow. It's just going to disappear. I was like, and and since that moment, I haven't been able to see games as anything other than a waste of time.

So I still do play games occasionally. So once in a blue moon, mostly with my kid, I'll pick up a game, I'll play for a little bit. But now I'm thoroughly, in completely aware that it is a quote-unquote waste of time. And if I'm okay wasting the time, it's fine. But these days, I'm not really okay wasting time.

You still play war games with your kid? I'm going to pick one or two up. Mostly these days, though, they're on their iPads playing their own games. It's fine. But what, what game would you have your kid play? And I asked this from the perspective of, I feel when I was growing up as a teenager, few games that really affected my mindset in life. FIFA, like the football game, because it just teaches you something about team play. Age of Empires, obviously, because you learn strategy. SimCity, because you learn administration. And The Sims, because you learn about self. I mean, look, I can argue for many of them. I can argue for The Sims and the Civilization type games. I can argue for board games, war games, strategy games.

The reality is, even the few games I play these days, they're just like runners or jumpers or fighters, you know, they don't have any real meaning to them. It's fine. There's, I think one of the, one of my tweets or analogies that went more viral than others was like, I really believe that you should live your life like an athlete or like a lion. Right? Which means that most of your time, you're resting, you're just fussing around, you're lazing around, you're just doing whatever you find entertaining. And then once in a while, you get obsessed with something, and something is important, and you just pour everything into it.

So I would rather be recharged and ready for my next intellectual or physical obsession than putting myself on the grinder of, "I have to wake up at this time, then eat my blueberries, and then do my push-ups," and just like live a regimented, mechanical life. I want to live a very free life. I don't want a calendar. I don't want to have to be in a specific place at a specific time. I don't want to have to answer to people. I just want to be free. And I think that's how you do your best work. And especially in an age where we have so much leverage in the system, either through code or media, or through other people, or through capital, the quality of your decision-making dominates everything.

Warren Buffett is one of the richest men in the world just because he makes a right decision once a year. So having a clear mind is way more important than anything else. Which, and this is all an excuse for laziness, which just lets me relax and relax and relax until I need to make that decision. But it's like, even if I look at my, you know, um, you know, having made money in life has happened through a bunch of different sources, but the number one was like way bigger than the number two through N put together. Two, number two was bigger than three through N put together. Three was bigger than four through N put together. And that's kind of how your entire life works.

What was number one, if you don't mind me? I'm not going to get into it. But it's, but it's, it's the compound interest applies in all intellectual and often even in relationship domains. So, for example, your number one relationship in your life, eventually your kids, currently your wife, maybe one of your parents, is going to be more valuable to you than kind of all the rest put together. Right? So maybe not so much in relationships, but definitely in, definitely in learning. You know, your best ideas are going to be worth more than all the rest. My best tweets, the few best tweets. You know, you're only judging your best work, not your worst.

So in that sense, being high output is really good. The current generation may judge you on your average, but the future, what'll happen is, let's say you record, I don't know how many podcasts have you recorded? 800. 800. Great. So, you know, by the time you're done, you'll probably have 2,000 or something before you're finally like, "Okay, I'm bored of this game." Right? So let's say you have 2,000 podcasts in your life. What's going to happen is 20 of them are going to be amazing. Okay? And those will stand the test of time, and they'll slowly trickle down, trickle down, trickle down. 100 years from now, people will be watching 20 of them. And then 200 years from now, 300 years from now, they'll be watching one of them. Right? So it's you, so in all of these intellectual domains, you are only judged by your best work in posterity. Which is not to say you can just shortcut to it, but most effort in life, in that sense, is wasted. But it's both training wheels for the winning one, plus you just never know when or where the right thing is going to emerge. So you kind of just have to keep moving.

But I, I, the thing I'm not a fan of is wasting time. Wasting time. You know, tedious meetings with tedious people. You know, traveling to places for business where there's like, you don't actually enjoy it. Anything ceremonial or ritual meetings, you know, complete waste of time. Most meetings. Just save your time, save your energy. Just be happy, enjoy yourself, and be, and be ready for the opportunity. Because there's a time when opportunity comes, and if you yourself are rested and ready, and you find yourself interested in it, then you have the space in your life and in your mind that you can be sucked into it.

And again, without any desire for a specific outcome. Because when you desire for a specific outcome, you're moving away from truth seeking. Because now you're looking for something, and if that thing turns out not to be true, you're going to try and force it. And we can't help it. We're desiring creatures. You wouldn't even be here on this Earth if you weren't a desiring creature, right? You'd just lie there in the dirt and let worms eat you. So you are a desiring creature. But you just have to be careful with your desires because they will take you away from your truth. Because true, true reasoning is unmotivated. It's, or it's motivated purely by curiosity. Curiosity just means you want to know the truth. That's all it is. So in that sense, curiosity is the pure motivation. Every other motivation is motivated reasoning and leads you to, is more likely to lead you to an incorrect answer.

And then the worst thing you can do is get through motivated reasoning, get to the falsehood, and then you bake that into your identity. You identify it with yourself. You say, "Well, because I'm a Hindu, or I'm a Christian, or I believe this, or because I'm a Republican or Democrat, I believe this." And then you get locked into that. Now that is a part of your understanding. It's a shaky foundation. And then you start attaching other things to that shaky foundation. Politics is a good example of this. Well, you know, because I, you know, believe in women's right for abortion, now I also have to believe that, you know, trans women are men, or men are women, and I have to believe that like, you know, there's no heritability in certain things, but there is in other things. I have to believe that capitalism is evil. You start plugging all these things together that don't actually belong together. They're voting coalitions. They're coalitions of voters that have assembled single-issue voters. But now all of a sudden, you have to adopt all of these beliefs. Or in Christian, you know, if I'm Christian, then I have to believe this and this and this, otherwise I'm not a true Christian. I have to believe this and this Hindu sect, otherwise not a true Hindu. All that is nonsense.

One of the best lines I heard on this was, "Buddha wasn't a Buddhist." You know, so all the people that you admire, all the people that you look up to, they're, they're not, they don't strongly self-identify with any movement. You know, Lee Kuan Yew created Singapore, where we're sitting today. He didn't consider himself Singaporean, right? He created that thing. So I think all of us are meant to not, okay, not nobody's meant to do anything, but all of us function at our best when we don't identify with anything outside of ourselves.

The one thing that this conversation is teaching me is that the universe is kind of wired to us up a little bit. Well, it would have to be to be interesting, right? If you could just, if it was predictable, it'd be boring. There'd be no point in being here.

Is this the most unserious podcast that you've ever done? I don't know. Probably. Maybe. I don't know. Are you comfortable being unserious? Sure. Yeah. I'm comfortable being me. I mean, I was so intimidated by the thought of speaking to you, but once I got talking to you, I've just realized that you're like any of us. You've just done the right things consistently, and you've done the things that you felt were easy, but made a habit out of a few other difficult things.

I think if there's one thing that my friends would say is that like, I try to figure everything out for myself. I don't listen to anybody else. Not even your wife? Nobody. Your kid? Nobody, really? Yeah. No gurus, no mentors, no teachers, no holy this or that. I mean, I definitely have learned from people, for sure. I've almost everything I know, I've learned from other people, but I've verified it for myself.

Is your work your guru? My work? Work, I don't work. You know how you have that saying about, "Choose something that feels like play to you, but work for others"? Oh, yeah. Yeah. And I think once you advance in that journey of play, it turns into art after a point. And that's how you look at all the products that you invest in, that they're art for you. Do they teach you things for life? Okay, whether it's in politics, science, business, spirituality, whatever. History remembers the artists. The artists are the people who are creative and march to their own beat and do their own thing.

Great software is art. Great business is art. Starting, even like starting a new country, you know, some level is art. You're creating X, N, Hilo. You're creating something out of nothing. Um, and, uh, that to me is like the most rewarding thing to be doing at any given time. But art can't be forced. It can't, in a sense, art is done for its own sake. It's not done for any external purpose. If you're doing it for money, it's less, you're hurting its capability to be art. It's not to say it can't still be great art, but you're just, you're now beholden to other interests. It's like motivated reasoning. It's like true scientists try to figure things out to fulfill their desire to figure things out. Right? And the moment they figure it out, it's complete. They don't need a Nobel Prize or a Fields Medal afterwards. And in fact, some of the better ones have rejected that. Or like, famously, Bob Dylan, I think rejected the Pulitzer Prize or whatever it was. Like he got some massive prize, didn't even show up, didn't even bother because he knows his music is good. He created for himself.

So I, I do think that is the highest calling, creating something for yourself because you want to exist. Now, nobody's perfect. We're not all going to get there. And there's always going to be external motivations. But the less, the more internally motivated you can be, the more the thing itself is the reward. The better the work you will do. Um, and, uh, the more fulfilling it is. So that's kind of what I aim for. Okay. But maybe that's just my excuse for being useless these days.

Okay. Um, you know, again, everyone views the world with the lens that their own mind has placed due to their own stories. MH. So the lens I view the world with is honestly pretty spiritual. And I know you don't like the word, but again, it's an outcome of growing up in India, in my eyes. There's a concept of the flow state. State of flow, where your best work happens. And I've always wondered to myself about your flow state, Naval's flow state. And for me, at least, based on what's visible to the public eye, it happens when you're tweeting, when you're in one of your speet storms, and it happens when someone's asking you the right questions and unlocking things. Am I right in like? Yeah.

I mean, in a flow state, your mind isn't obsessing with itself. It's, you're not thinking about yourself. You're focused on the thing. You're focused on the activity. It's a meditative state. It's, it's a state where, like, for example, if you're drawing or painting, then you are the brush, you are the paint. You're only thinking about that. And there is no internal chatter. You're not saying, "Oh man, you know, can't wait for dinner," or "I can't believe my wife said this to me." That, that's all gone. And that's, and you're also operating at the edge of your capability. So it's interesting enough that you, you are being stressed, you're being strained, you know, you're operating at the edge. But it's not so far forward that you are being confused or you're like, obviously screwing up.

So flow state is a wonderful thing. It's, it's a very meditative state. But probably the, the shortest way to not be in a flow state is to try to be in a flow state, right? Because it's again, that effort, right? So it comes much more from you find things that you like to do. And then when you, and because you like to do something, you're interested in it, you're going to get good at it.

It you're going to be doing it, and as you're doing it, you're climbing that ladder of, uh, of mastery. And any, you can climb that ladder in literally anything. Um, as you get more and more into it, um, you're going to be more and more in flow. Uh, I, my problem is I switch around a lot. So I fall in love with something, I obsess over it, I learn everything I possibly can about it over a couple of months kind of period, and then once I figure the basics out, 80/20, I start getting bored. And then when I start getting bored, I just sort of background it. It becomes a piece of my knowledge and understanding, and then I just move on to the next thing, or I just spend time being bored until the next thing comes along.

Do you think that the Flow State sometimes allows you to channelize knowledge that's present externally? I don't know what I'm going to say until I say it. So it's kind of funny that one of the ways that I learn what I think is by saying it. And the same way, one of the ways that I learn what I know is by tweeting it. So very often, I'll just be talking with a friend, I'll be hanging out, I'll be having dinner, or I'll be sitting at home by myself late at night, and I'll just have a thought, and it'll come into my mind almost fully baked, and I'm like, "Oh, I should tweet that." And then I'll tweet it. And then sometimes I have a second thought, "I better change this." And usually the first version is always the best. Uh, I don't know where it comes from. It's kind of interesting. It comes from beyond, whatever that means, right? Maybe it comes from the depths of my mind, maybe it comes from somewhere else, but they come to me fully formed, which is kind of the entertaining thing. I mean, I'm of the belief that it comes from somewhere else. Creativity is a mysterious force, right? Yeah.

I don't know. I mean, that's again, I keep bringing this up, man, but when I'm talking to you, I feel like I'm talking to Rishi. You know, Rishi is so, uh, kind of embarrassing. Sorry, but that's, that's what it feels like. So, you know, on a very primal level, the podcast for me is based on my childhood dream of wanting to explore the Himalayas and have conversations with sages. And I'm just like making money off of it right now. Spend your life in the company of geniuses, sages, children, and books, right? Yeah. But again, this is one of those things that figured through the show. Whenever I speak to monks, they keep talking about the Flow State. How it is meditative, it is a form of working your mind towards evolution, but one needs to be humble within the Flow State and understand that it's not their own thoughts and creativity, but it's being placed in their head externally by the. Yeah, in a real Flow State, you're not thinking about yourself. So it's not coming from this. Look, when, when self is a very loaded word, right? It's another one of the self. It's another one of these words that can mean a lot of different things. But there's kind of the separate self, the identity, the story, the character, the name, the, uh, kind of the, the emotional predilections toward doing certain, certain things and not doing others, the reactions, the memories. That's the false self, okay? We know that from Hinduism and Buddhism and Hindu mythology, and they've written it down much better than I could ever say. Um, that's the false self. But yet, that's the self that we function under 95% of the time. And when we go into a flow state, that self quiets down for a bit. And then all that remains is true self, which is just, I don't have a name for it. Maybe you have a name for it. It's just the thing that is, right? It's existence itself. It's consciousness. It's awareness. To me, they're identical.

Right. As an aside, one of the, I think, I think there's a lot of great questions out there that people just don't ask because they're so cliched, right? So, uh, one of the questions I love is like, if a tree falls in the forest and there's no one around to hear it, doesn't make a sound. So cliche. I think about that one all the time, you know, because it really asks a question like, you know, is existence and are existence and consciousness the same thing? Like, in what sense can something be said to exist if nothing is ever conscious of it or its or its effects? Um, another one that I like to think about is the philosophical zombie problem, which is, you know, why do we even need consciousness? Why couldn't you just be walking around reacting like an automaton to everything, and I could see the exact same reactions, the exact same emotions, and whatever, but you just don't need to be conscious. Why, why, why does that, why aren't we all just, uh, philosop, why aren't we all just zombies? Um, and actually, it's funny because the Buddhist answer to that is, if you think it through, it's kind of, it's not why consciousness, the answer is why zombie? Like, does the zombie actually exist, or is that just a figment of the, you know, awareness's imagination? Um, another one that I like is, uh, you know, some of the wisdom that's really old is so embedded in culture, we don't think about it. Row, row, row your boat. You know that one? Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream. Yeah, it's so smart. Nobody thinks about it. Nobody talks. It's so smart. That's, that's like one of the greatest works of art ever created, row, row, row your boat. In other words, your work, right? The analogy is, you're sitting in a boat, you're kind of by yourself. Yeah, there might be other boats, but you're kind of by yourself. You're rowing, you got to row, you got to do some work. Gently down the stream. Gently, yeah. You don't struggle too much. You know, you kind of have to figure out what you can navigate without getting all stressed out. Down the stream. It's a good analogy for life. The river, you know, it's going off, you know, it's going to die at the end. Um, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily. Yeah, that's, that's the right attitude. Life is but a dream. That's the cold hard truth. Life is but a dream. It appears, it disappears, it ends. Infinity on both sides, right? There's so much wisdom in that little poem and stuck around forever. But instead, we have to go looking at complicated books to figure this out.

As I've learned through the show, they say that the curse of human life is that once you die, you realize that human life was the dream. Yeah. I mean, nobody knows what happens when you die, right? That's kind of the mystery that makes it all fun. Um, but, you know, to your point about being attracted to like Indian, uh, sort of ideals and memories, I, I have found as I grow older, I gravitate more and more towards those things. Like, um, do you mind that I'm bringing it up so much in this conv? No, no, it's fine. It's fine. Anything is fine. It's just a part of my identity. Yeah, it's fine. I mean, I'm Indian too, by origin, and probably will end up back there at some point when I'm old enough. You know, I think about it. I, I like India. I love India. These are, these are, these are my brothers and sisters, right? These are my people. I am, I am one of them. So there's a couple of places I would love to take you to in India. I told you about one of them in the car, uh, which is the mountains, like Himalayas. There are too many secrets. Like that's where you actually find the wisdom of the sages, and you feel it in the air. The other place is Banaras, Varanasi. Yeah, which is, according to Sanatan, it's the oldest city in the world. And you do feel that it is chaotic, but there's another part of it that's extremely quiet. There's a part of Banaras called the Manikarnika Ghat. Mhm. Where they perpetually burn bodies for the sake of cremation. Mhm. They say that when you stand at the Manikarnika and you view the bodies burning, whatever is inside you flares up and comes on to the outside. And that's where something inside you shifts. So for me, I just became very curious, and I became more serious about this journey of podcasting. I realized that this is my true, uh, guy. Japanese concept for the sake of curiosity because you come, uh, face to face with death. You see human bodies burning. You know, if you actually view a human body burning, at some point the skull explodes. So when you see that happening in front of you, it shifts something inside. And I feel, again, India is definitely not for everyone, but it is for seekers. I mean, if you could keep your death in front of you at all times, you would live a magical life. Then you would value the exact moment at it's, you know, as being the complete and wholesome and only real sacred thing that exists.

Do you keep it, death in front of you? I try to. It's not, it doesn't always work, but I do. It's probably, it's probably the most liberating thing that I do. It's not, I don't do it as an exercise. I just, but it is on my mind a lot. What's an ideal death for you? It doesn't matter. Hopefully not slowly or painfully. But, you know, it's, when it, when it's gone, it's gone. I guess the ideal would be, it would be good to be, to have, uh, self-realized before for that, you know, ultimate truth. Be good. I don't know if there's such a thing. That's, that's enlightenment. Enlightenment is not something you necessarily, from what I can tell, it's not something you necessarily find or create. It's more just unlearning. It's a shedding. It's what remains when everything else is gone. So it's, it is a mini death of its own sort. It is a death of the separate self in the mind. Um, and I'm not looking for that kind of death, but I would say I'm looking for truth. And if that's true, then I'll take the truth. I'll take the truth. I'll take an unhappy truth over a lie any day. And I don't think it's an unhappy truth anyway, but it doesn't matter. I'm, I'm open to whatever the truth is. If the truth is, oh, I'm just a brain in a vat, this is a simulation, and someone's poking and poking at me, and they're going to torture me for eternity. Fine. Show me the truth. I'd rather know the truth.

You know, in the Joe Rogan episode, you spoke about how you used to meditate, yeah, and you would just view your own thoughts. You'd sit in a place and just view your own thoughts. And through that process, sometimes you read stillness, but you also had some psychedelic experiences. Do you ever think about those? I kind of got bored of it. Um, and, and I, and I just, I don't think experiences are, are the thing. They did the distractions, yes. Any experience that comes will also go. Uh, the, the thing that matters is what your state of mind is, you know, at 2:30 p.m. in the afternoon when you're sitting by yourself, how do you feel? Are you, are you peaceful? Are you happy? Are you good? You know, 2:37 p.m., you're walking down the street, are you okay? How do you feel? Are you good? That's what matters. Moments, right? It's the exact moment in time. What is your internal state? What is your external state? Um, you know, what are the thoughts that are going through your head, if any? That's what matters. So I don't want bliss for an hour a day. Uh, that's just another experience that comes and goes. I want, I want something that's indestructible.

Did you ever smoke weed? Uh, you know, I live in California. When you were younger? No, no. Luckily, that's the kind of thing that if I discovered in my youth, I don't think I would have had a very productive youth because you get too into it. Yeah, it's, it's, it's too easy to turn off your brain. I think things like weed, you know, the West is going through a very hedonistic phase where it's all about being single and partying and doing drugs. And, um, those are hard things to resist. They can really destroy your sense of self-being. Uh, I've definitely seen people who have done way too many. Even like, say, for example, common belief now is that like mushrooms are harmless, right? They're not. I mean, you do enough of that stuff, it'll break your brain. You'll end up believing too many things that aren't real. Um, you know, same thing with weed, it'll rob you of ambition because it's, it's a very feminizing drug. It's a plant estrogen. So you're just going to sit there all day and smoke weed, and you're not going to go do anything with your life. So yes, there are definitely things that I have tried, but luckily, I would say I'm, I, I'm not getting sucked into any of them. Fair. I mean, even water in excess is bad. Sure. Although that one, we're pretty well evolved for, right? It's just like, for example, if you just from an evolutionary past, if you had access to like easy weed all the time, you would have gotten eaten by something, right? You wouldn't have made it very far. Um, it's just in modern society, yeah, we can do that. Modern society is really weird where we, we've changed our physical environment much faster than we're adapted for. So we do need all kinds of coping mechanisms, right? For example, we're all overfed, we're underexercised, uh, we're overstimulated. Our minds are worrying about far away things, right? The media. The purpose of the media, as I've joked before, is to make every problem your problem. Right? You go on, you go on social media, and it's just all dueling meme viruses, each one trying to occupy a slot in your brain to make you care. Well, you know, a thousand years ago, someone could have gotten shot or blown up in some far away country, you would have never heard about it. You had no stake in it. You had no way of knowing about it. Now, it's just, your brain is not, man, is not designed to handle all the world's emergencies in real time as they break. It's breaking your brain at some deep level. You're not even meant to see violence or pornography. Like those are very weird and rare and unique new things. Uh, and so the modern struggle is to navigate through the fruits of abundance, uh, that are wrecking you, right? It's actually the, the challenge of modernity is avoiding the fruits of modernity, right? For you have to become almost a yogi in self-defense to protect yourself. It's called Vairagya in our culture, and it means being in the middle of a party, yeah, and seeing everyone party around you and being happy for them, but not taking part in the party yourself, other than just keeping your mind there. Yeah. This is why I'm finding it harder and harder to go to parties because it's hard not to get involved and to indulge. But it's so meaningless. It's just another game, right? Uh, and they're fun, and occasionally I do go to parties, and I do like a good party, and you have a higher odds of dragging me out to a good party than to like some tedious meeting. Um, but all that said, like, even parties have kind of lost their luster.

What's Naval Ravikant like when he's drunk or high? Same, but more talkative. More talkative. More talkative. Yeah, because you're inherently a bit of an introvert. Yes. Yeah. Gotcha. Yeah. On a podcast, I'm not. But, uh, left to my own devices, I'm very much an introvert. I would much rather read or be on the internet or just be walking around thinking or, you know, listening to YouTube or a podcast or something than, uh, hanging out with people.

Do you miss your childhood? No, but I don't really think about it. I don't think about the past much consciously. Yeah, they, when you're asking me the question, I'm being forced to think about it for the first time in a long time. My bad. No, no, there's nothing wrong with it. I'm just saying I don't think about it. So I don't, I don't have a, I don't have a predigested answer for you. That's great. Yeah, no, but I would say no, I don't miss my childhood. I don't, it's, it's like a dream. Is it real? Did it actually happen? Wow. There's a quote that goes like, the past is fiction. It is fiction. The past, the past is, uh, it is a narrative. You don't remember most of it. The little bit that you do remember is very selective memory stitched into a narrative. There's no point in really remembering it. Presumably there are lessons to learn, but you probably already digested those and learned them. You don't even have to think about those. So what's the point?

Do you think about the future at all? I think about the future for practical things. Career stuff. Well, like, yeah, if I have to make money or an investment, or if I have to like figure out what to do with the this child and this problem and solve that, or, you know, where do I want to have dinner? So yeah, in that sense, we are future planners. But, uh, I don't, I don't think too far ahead. I don't, I don't obsess over it. But I'm more of a future creature than a past creature, for sure. In an ideal world, I wouldn't think that much about the future either, but I'm not there. I think we're forced to. In order, you have to. I mean, you're, you're a functioning creature that has to navigate the world. But I, I, I want to think about the future as regards to utilitarian things, you know, food, money, uh, you know, those kinds of things, problem solving. I don't want to think about the future in the sense of what does it hold for me? Like, am I going to be happy? Am I going to be, uh, in a good relationship? You know, am I going to die? Like, the death thing is interesting to think about. You kind of can't look away. It's like the most important thing that's going to happen to you, right? So you have to think about it. But, uh, I, I don't want to think about, I don't want to self-obsess in the future. The reason I don't self-obsess anymore, or never even got that into it, is because I just found it both a waste of time, as well as it was just destroying my happiness. Happiness is a big word. So more peace intruding on my peace. Gotcha.

I think we're almost at the end of the episode. What advice do you have for me? I don't have advice for you. I mean, you, you must have gotten to know something about me at this point. Or maybe I'll ask you the career advice aspect because I could reframe this question as, how do you view the world of content creators going into the future? I would, okay, I'll give you some advice. I like, I like being provocative. So I would say, be selfish. Be more selfish. Make sure you really enjoy your work. Make sure you really are only working with the people that you really like doing like working with. Make sure you are only have the guests on that you're proud to have on, that you genuinely want to have conversations with. Um, because I, I think the value, you've already built something of incredible value, and it's going to continue compounding. So the value now is about the longevity. How long can you keep it going? Whether you go to episode a thousand or 2,000 or 5,000 matters more than, you know, you don't want to be in grinder mode. If you're just grinding, you're going to burn out, and the day you or not this thing is over. So I would say, just make sure you enjoy yourself. And, uh, so that's part of it. Uh, so be selfish and make sure you enjoy yourself. And then the second part of being selfish is talk to people where you genuinely want to talk to them. Don't, don't just record a podcast or record a podcast because you know you have to make a certain amount of money or you got to check a box because you will be judged at the end of the day by your best work, not by any, by your average. All my content that is out there that people like, I didn't do it for them. I didn't do it for anything. I didn't do it for anyone. I just did it for me. And it was deeply selfish. It was just notes to self. And there's nothing wrong with that because we're all the same inside. So if you, if you're creating art, then you do it for its own sake. You do it because you enjoy it. And then other people will see the same thing that you saw in it, um, and they'll get value out of it. So I say, just be selfish, and you can sustain it.

Okay, now I will, uh, you know, take the layers off. I'll take the filters off and tell you that this was one of the biggest days of my podcasting career, man. You're very nice. Um, you have helped me so much from a professional perspective, being on the other side of the world, and just speaking on other podcasts. And there's so many people like me who just sit in different parts of this globe and consume pieces of your mind through Twitter, through the stuff you say on podcasts. And I know you're very nonchalant about it, like you're just enjoying it, but you're adding so much value to our lives. And so many of us have daddy issues and mommy issues, and I think Naval Ravikant has become kind of a big brother figure to people all over the globe. And to just be able to share screen space with you is one of the biggest honors of my life. Yeah, at the same time, the worst thing I could do for myself is is get into the idea of having a fanbase because, uh, fame is a beast. It'll lead you alive. And I don't want to do anything for other people. I don't care about if they respect me or not. Disrespect all day long. Who cares? Shit. I mean, I hear you. Uh, and, you know, just observing you go about how you handle fame. We were together at an event right now. It, it's taught me a lot, just sharing. I don't think I handle it well. You know, I get approached by a lot of people, they want to take a photo. It always kind of weirds me out a little bit. No, it's just, it'd be better not to be famous, to be honest. If I had to do it over again, it might be better to be anonymous. Thank God you're not anonymous. But Naval, genuinely, from the bottom of my heart, I bow down to you. No, don't bow. Please. That's embarrassing. People, relationships only. I hear you, but no bows, no gurus. Anybody calls me, you want to not be my friend, call me a guru. Not going to be friends. I, I don't think you're a guru, but you are a bit of a bhaiya. You know what bhaiya means? Brother. Yeah. Big brother. Yeah. That's what I look at you as. And that's how a lot of brown people look at you as. We're all brothers. That works. There's some people who just emit that Sensei energy, and it's not their will. Again, it's the universe working through you. That's how I look at you. So thank you for everything you've given all of us. You're guiding a lot of young people, and you're helping everyone with their mental and spiritual health without knowing it. Thank you. You're very kind. As are you. 800 episodes, and you're obviously seeking bigger and bigger truths. So you're on a good path. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Uh, I hope we get to speak again in life, and I hope you had a very nice time. To me, thank you. I did. Thanks for having me.

That was the episode. Uh, it was not easy to make this particular episode happen. I had to fly to Singapore, which is a 5-hour flight away from Mumbai. Of course, Naval flew from halfway across the world. Our common friend, Balaji, told me that there is this opportunity and Naval's agreed to do this particular episode. So this was the first ever episode we shot on foreign soil. In my eyes, it's the first international episode on TRS, even though we've shot one with Arnold Schwarzenegger in Korea, we've shot an episode with Ronnie Coleman in India, we've shot an episode with Braun Strowman in India, countless foreign cricketers. But I truly feel like my international phase of this podcasting journey begins with this very important and very iconic episode of The Ranveer Show. Couldn't sleep on the night of this episode because this was a very important life moment for me. It's something I've visualized for a very long time before we executed upon this podcast. Dream come true for anyone who's been listening to podcasts for the last decade, we all know what a big deal Naval Ravikant is. I'm just glad I got to do this very easygoing conversation with him, and I hope that he returns on The Ranveer Show at some point in the future. I will be attaching all his social handles down below. So for those of you who are being introduced to him for the first time, please go follow Naval Ravikant on every social media platform. I also urge you to pick up snippets from this conversation and turn them into reels and shots for social media. Thank you for listening in. DRS and the whole team, we'll be back very, very soon. [Music]